5 thoughts on “More About Customerless Car Companies”

I admit it’s not exactly deep insight and the last half of it is about an ad-campaign. Actually, please read our customerless car articles for more on this topic.
The key thing is Mazda is steering clear of letting cars turn into furniture. There’s a reason furniture brands don’t stick in people’s minds. “Hey Lord, won’t you buy me a Herman Miller”, would not have worked so much as a request for a Benz.

Hmmm, it does sound a little of the ” … doth complain too much” brand of PR/ messaging. I agree with its sentiments, but I doubt its motives. I don’t expect Mazda has anything like the R&D budget to play in this arena, so it’s obviously in its interests to diss this somewhat disturbing (I find) area of automotive development. As the population (of the western world, at least) ages, I can foresee plenty of demand for driver-less vehicles and it’s no coincidence that Google chose, among others, a couple from the third age to help publicize its Car.

Self driving cars have a lot of advantages for many people so they will be accepted easily. I believe most people want a self driving car during traffic jams and based on this the tech will sell like hot cakes. The marketing guy should be fired. I really think he missed ‘the Kodak case’ as part of his education (miscalculating the digital camera trend => bankruptcy). There is no gain (maybe a short term gain, maybe) in trying to resist to a technology with many advantages for normal people. Most people just want to get from A to B as comfortably as possible … and the self driving car will improve comfort. Just like most people wanted to make a decent picture fast and easy.

The enthousiasts and professionals still use old analog camera gear. I guess Mazda can start to make some calculations based on that… 2030 Mazda market share 0.05%?

I think what most people don’t see yet, is that a self driving car will not be very different from today’s cars. Because in the end, if shirt happens, the thing will still crash (or something will crash on it) sometimes at high speed. This means that to protect your imperfect human body, the self driving car will still need to have (1) seat belts, (2) airbags, (3) crumple zones and any other safety device that today’s cars have. And this means that all of the fancy futuristic loungy concepts will never happen, except when they are limited to low speeds.

I typed a longer message and lost it. The short one is that whatever Mazda actually does in a decade is unaffected by the message today that they are drivercentric and won´t build autonomous cars. I don´t expect Mr Wager will be around in 2025 to have his words checked up on but some people will like this message and buy a Mazda in part because of its tone and content. Cynical? Yes, but good marketing!

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Driven To Write was founded by three like-minded writers frustrated with the polarised motoring journalism on offer. Our aim has been to publish the kind of diverse and original content no-one else appears interested in producing. Off-message, idiosyncratic, quixotic or sometimes just daft, while we sometimes tip our hat to the daily spin of the news cycle, as soon as the tub stops rotating we march unapologetically on to a different drumbeat - even if it's one that only we can hear …

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